“COUNT LASCASES,

“Since sixt week y learn the English and y do not any progress.  Sixt week do fourty and two day.  If might have learn fivty word, for day, i could know it two thousands and two hundred.  It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand:  even he could most twenty; bot much of tems.  For know it or hundred and twenty week, which do more two years.  After this you shall agree that the study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged.”

How much farther Napoleon progressed in his efforts to absorb our language by these mathematical methods we do not know; for no other English letter of his seems to be extant.  The arrest and departure of his tutor soon occurred, and there are good grounds for assigning this ultimately to the jealousy of the less cultured Generals.  Thus, we find Gourgaud asserting that Las Cases has come to St. Helena solely “in order to get talked about, write anecdotes, and make money.”  Montholon also did his best to render the secretary’s life miserable, and on one occasion predicted to Gourgaud that Las Cases would soon leave the island.[578]

The forecast speedily came true.  The secretary intrusted to his servant, a dubious mulatto named Scott, two letters for Europe sewn up in a waistcoat:  one of them was a long letter to Lucien Bonaparte.  The servant showed the letters to his father, who in some alarm revealed the matter to the Governor.  It is curious as illustrating the state of suspicion then prevalent at St. Helena, that Las Cases accused the Scotts of being tools of the Governor; that Lowe saw in the affair the frayed end of a Longwood scheme; while the residents there suspected Las Cases of arranging matters as a means of departure from the island.  There was much to justify this last surmise.  Las Cases and his son were unwell; their position in the household was very uncomfortable; and for a skilled intriguer to intrust an important letter to a slave, who was already in the Governor’s black books, was truly a singular proceeding.  Besides, after the arrest, when the Governor searched Las Cases’ papers in his presence, they were found to be in good order, among them being parts of his “Journal.”  Napoleon himself thought Las Cases guilty of a piece of extraordinary folly, though he soon sought to make capital out of the arrest by comparing the behaviour of our officers and their orderlies with “South Sea savages dancing around a prisoner that they are about to devour."[579] After a short detention at Ross Cottage, when he declined the Governor’s offer that he should return to Longwood, the secretary was sent to the Cape, and thence made his way to France, where a judicious editing of his “Memoirs” and “Journal” gained for their compiler a rich reward.